


Bad timeline

by chancellorxofxtrash (PhoebeMurdivine)



Category: 999: Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors - Fandom, Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Canonical to Safe Ending i mean, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Safe Ending, Self-Destruction, and it's debatable how much are they even trying, obviously 999 spoilers all around, sort of, these two are fucked up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-06 12:08:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11035893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoebeMurdivine/pseuds/chancellorxofxtrash
Summary: It was inevitable, Zero had said. But it did not make the aftermath better





	Bad timeline

**Author's Note:**

> I talked about it on tumblr like how long will it take for me to write this well look out everyone because I actually did it

“Expendable” is one of the first things Santa said, his voice bitter, when explaining everything. It was all expendable, he said. Then later he stopped. shaking his head.

“No, that is not right. More like a necessary sacrifice. It was…”

“Inevitable?”

It was something Zero had told Junpei when he announced the end of the Nonary Game.

Heh… Zero.

Obviously, it was Santa.

Or…

“Yea. It was inevitable. It was unavoidable… I guess for both you and me.”

Junpei went back to college, and nobody really asked anything. He wasn’t someone who was skipping classes a lot but wasn’t a model student either, and he was gone only for a short while. Oh, his friends were worried after, when they realised how quiet Junpei had gotten, but he could brush them off, and nobody pried.

And it was just fine like that.

It was time for returning to his normal life, to his classes.

But one weekend, he couldn’t stand it anymore, and went back to his childhood village. To be honest, he wasn’t even surprised, when he ran into someone with a familiar shock of white hair.

_“Santa, huh. Whatever. Name’s Aoi. I doubt there’s anyone else I could be Santa Claus for.”_

And that was when he told him everything.

There were many things Junpei wanted to ask, but many of them were questions Junpei wasn’t yet ready to voice, even though Aoi’s completely blank voice told him, that he would have answered.

Instead, he settled for an easier question,

“Why don’t I know you? I feel like I should. I remember being with her, being her friend, but you…”

“Probably thanks to her” Aoi shrugged. “The morphogenetic field can allow you to manipulate lots of things, and she was better at it than I ever had been. She probably figured out a way to temporarily block memories.”

“Like with Seven?”

“Yea. You recognising me would have been a problem. It was already suspicious to everyone that there were a few connected people, like you two as childhood friends, not to mention Snake and Clover. Add me to the equation, as another sibling pair, and again, someone you also knew… it would have been way too suspicious.”

Junpei wondered if he would ever remember Aoi. Not Santa, not the foul mouthed man, who he believed to be a fellow captive, turned out to be one of the masterminds.

He wondered whether he’d remember Aoi Kurashiki, Akane’s big brother. He wondered what he was like.

“Do _you_ remember me?”

Aoi turned his head, giving Junpei with a noncaring look.

“You were around her so much, it’s impossible not to. Although… my memories are a bit blurry too. I guess I was also affected by her meddling, so to speak.”

-

“How was she there, though? Like… if she…”

This was what Junpei could not understand. If Akane Kurashiki died in that Nonary Game, how come June could be there in the next one?

How could she be there? It couldn’t have been explained with the morphogenetic field, Junpei clearly remembered her interacting with others too. And not just with the other espers (god, Junpei was an _esper_ he never thought he’d ever find out that about himself), but with those who had no such abilities as well.

June was there, but Akane died.

By all accounts, it was impossible.

“Have you ever heard about Schrödinger’s cat?”

Junpei was actually really close to snapping and just straight-up telling Aoi that he had enough of philosophical discussions and talking about bizarre phenomenons but he stopped himself.

His life was a paradox now either way.

“It’s that… thing about the cat being simultanously dead and alive, right?”

Aoi nodded.

“Yea, something like that. It has a lot of things to do with… eh, whatever. You know the basics. It’s kind of like that. For these nine years, she… she was basically existing as Schrödinger’s cat. She was both dead and alive, a living paradox. Her fate wasn’t set in stone until…”

“Until I picked the wrong doors.”

Junpei finished it, and Aoi just shrugged, without answering.

-

It was his fault.

It was all his fault, it was his fault.

It

was

his

fault.

_It was his fault._

-

So he went to a party to get completely smashed. It was a normal college kid thing to do, right? If you are stressed, if you fucked up, go and get drunk.

Only he didn’t fail an exam, instead he caused his childhood friend to disappear from existence.

Fucking whoops.

He was only half-surprised when he already found Aoi drinking at the bar, and without thinking he crashed down next to him, and ordered the same thing Aoi eas drinking, which prompted the white-haired guy to flash a shit-eating grin.

“You fucking think you can keep up with me, punk?”

“Who the hell are _you_ calling a punk?”

Either way, they both got drunk, and ended up grinding on the dance floor.

And when the sun rose, it found them both in Junpei’s apartment, and Junpei stopped questioning his life.

-

After that, Aoi was just sort of… there.

Sometimes he would be gone for a few weeks, but then he’d knock in Junpei’s door. Sometimes he’d wait for him after his classes. One memorable occasion he even sat in to one of Junpei’s lectures and ended up snoring.

Junpei tried to pretend he did not know him, but it all flew out the window because Aoi was actually sleeping on his damn shoulder.

They didn’t always have sex, which in some way, was even more confusing. It would have been easy to just think about how all they needed to ease the tension in their muscles, some ways to self-destruct.

There were times where they both got completely shitfaced drunk, there were times they left bruises on each other, or kissed so rough their lips bled, sometimes it was both of those, and sometimes it was neither. Junpei wasn’t sure which one of them started smoking first, but soon Junpei’s whole apartment smelled like cigarette smoke, so probably that was just another way they were self-destructing.

Junpei supposed there could have been worse ways to do so.

He just wasn’t sure how.

-

“You said it was inevitable.”

“Hm?”

They were smoking that time too, Junpei sitting on the couch and Aoi half-lying down next to him, resting his legs in Junpei’s lap, careful not to make ashes fall on each other.

“When it was over. You said my choices were inevitable. Does that mean you knew from the beginning which is the good choice? Did you know this had to happen?”

Aoi exhaled the smoke, looking back up at Junpei’s ceiling, and was quiet for a short while before answering.

“I did not know until the end this was a wrong choice, no. I think she didn’t want to tell me the correct choices so I would not intervene.”

“...why would she do that?”

“She told me she had seen a lot of different options. She said she had seen outcomes where everyone dies, she said she had seen outcomes where basically none of us die apart from the responsible ones. Which means these… well, bad outcomes do exist. If she had seen them, they exist.”

“You also said this was expendable. Or a… necessary sacrifice.”

“Yeah. Because she said… she said the bad timelines, let’s call them that, they are necessary. Because you discover information in them that she can reach through the morphogenetic field to your other self. The one in the good timeline.”

“So we live in a bad timeline don’t we?”

“You bet we do. Meanwhile something you found out here, in this bad timeline… it actually helped your self in the good timeline.”

“Well, fuck him.”

Aoi laughed out loud, and reached out to put out his cigarette in the ashtray before shifting his weight, and settling into Junpei’s lap, taking his cigarette too.

“Well, one thing’s for sure, I ain’t fucking him, but you.”

Junpei snorted, rolling his eyes.

“Really, Aoi, really? That’s your reaction?”

“What? It’s true. Well, I’m not sure about the good timeline’s me, whether he’d fucking you or nah, but I don’t fucking care. Do you?”

“...not particularly, no.”

Aoi’s lips were on his neck, but Junpei wanted to ask one more thing before letting himself be lost in Aoi’s touch again.

“...don’t you hate me?”

“...what the fuck for?”

“You know what for.”

That made Aoi raise his head, and Junpei looked into Aoi’s eyes.

They weren’t that empty anymore, but they were impossible to read any emotion out of them.

“I can’t hate you for not being a good timeline version of you. You had to exist, and so did I. She had deemed this timeline expendable. She probably will never think of this timeline again… and neither will the good timeline version of me. Or you. There’s literally no fucking reason to hate you.”

“I do hate me though.”

“That’s alright, I hate me too. Can I fucking kiss you now?”

-

“So. Aoi. I’ve been thinking.”

There was no reply, but Aoi turned towards Junpei in his chair, obviously listening, so Junpei took this as a cue to continue.

“It’s really unfair right? We are trapped in a bad timeline essentially. In video games if you reach a bad end, you get a game over, and you can start again, but we can’t do that. We have to deal with this.”

“It took you this long to discover this is unfair? Maybe you had been drinking too much it can’t be good for your brain.”

“Listen to me what I have to say!” Junpei leaned on Aoi’s chair, towering over him. “We are here, and there’s nothing we can do about it. She might be alive in other timelines, but in the timelines she is alive she doesn’t give a crap about _us_ right? She probably cares about those versions of us but not _us._ So I think… I think we have to get our shit together I mean. We can’t continue like this forever.”

Aoi did not reply, just looked at him silently, with his unreadable expression. Aoi’s face sometimes was very expressive, but other times it was like looking at a frozen statue, impossible to figure out what he was thinking.

So Junpei continued.

“I mean… Ace and his lackeys could not have been the only ones. And the way you and Akane set the second game up you two had to have resources right?”

“Right.”

Junpei straightened his back, exhaling a deep breath.

“Look… I just… I don’t think I can finish college now, not the way I am. Not in the foreseeable future at least. But… but maybe we should do something.”

Aoi groaned, rubbing his face.

“We did all that… I did that to save Akane. That was the whole point.”

“Well, yeah. But I fucked up, and I got to deal with it. But maybe we can save ourselves from drinking ourselves to death.”

“That was really fucking profound of you Junpei.”

“Shut up. So, what are you saying?”

Junpei extended his hand, and Aoi took it with a sigh.

“You are a fucking idiot, though.”

-

Honestly, later Junpei found this last statement to be hypocritical as all hell, when he found out that the name of their organization was fucking _Crash Keys,_ but that was neither here nor there.

-

It wouldn’t be simple, obviously. They cut back the cigarettes, but they still smelt like smoke, but the times they spent in bed felt less and less like destruction. One could argue though that they merely exchanged alcohol for chasing down religious (and other types) of fanatics, but that was neither here or there.

They were never gonna be completely safe, if they would not endanger themselves, they would self-destruct, apparently. Such is the fate of the ones in bad timelines, apparently.

But still.

They managed.

They lived.

And that was good enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
